Movie Reviews
Take Shelter
Michael Shannon is a blue-collar worker in Ohio who begins having very vivid, apocalyptic nightmares. They are so real that when a dog bites him in a dream, his arm hurts for days. His mother was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in 1986 and has spent the rest of her life in an institution. Naturally, he fears he is going crazy, but he is so obsessed with his visions that thoughts of ... Read more »
Take Me Out to the Ball Game
The thinnest possible plot holds together a series of song and dance numbers by Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Jules Munshin, Betty Garrett, and Esther Williams. (Right after this one the first four co-starred in the vastly superior On the Town.) Kelly and Sinatra are ballplayers who spend their winters as a vaudeville act. Yeah, right. Sinatra prefers baseball, Kelly prefers the stage. Esther ... Read more »
Take Care of My Cat
Take Care of My Cat (Goyangileul butaghae) (South Korea, 2001) Five girls get out of high school and face life in the real world. The movie is mostly a character study, not a lot happens plot-wise, but I enjoyed it quite a bit. This is the 3rd Korean movie I’ve seen recently, and all are totally different. You may realize, intellectually, that places like Korea and Japan are very, very ... Read more »
Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War
Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War (Taegukgi hwinalrimyeo) (Korea, 2004) I learn that this movie is both the most expensive and the most popular Korean film of all time. $12,000,000 is hardly enough to shoot a one-minute commercial in Hollywood, but apparently Korean won go farther. Actually, that’s about 12 billion won. And they certainly got every won of it up on the screen. Literally a ... Read more »
Tabu: A Story of the South Seas
Our friend David Crosby’s father, Floyd, was a cinematographer. The IMDb lists 112 credits for him, from 1931 to 1967. Many if not most of them were for B movies, westerns and horror, and some of my personal favorites from my teenage years, like Beach Blanket Bingo, Bikini Beach, and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini. (Yeah, I know they were ... Read more »
The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom
I’d been hearing about this one for years, and I can tell you it is all it was cracked up to be.
First, the director, Michael Ritchie. He went on a streak beginning with Downhill Racer in 1969, one of the best sports movies ever made. Then he made The Candidate, one of the best political movies, and Read more »
Running On Empty
For me and Lee, this is one of the best films of all time. It’s not on my Top 25 list, but it easily could be. It tells of a family perpetually on the run from the FBI. Mom and Dad bombed a supposedly empty building during their crazy political days, and a man inside was blinded. Their youngest son was 2 at the time; they’ve since had another boy. They remain radical lefties, ... Read more »
The Proposition
If a cowboy movie made in Spain by Italians is a Spaghetti Western, what’s the proper term for a western made in Australia? How about a Didjeridu Oater? The outback isn’t standing in for Texas in this one, but there are no kangaroos or emus in it, and the director clearly is going for some sort of mythic frontier thing here, so it might as well be Buffalo Turd, Nebraska, as ... Read more »
The Runaways
… was the name of the first girl group Joan Jett was in. The movie is based on a book written by Cherie Currie, one of the other girls, who was only 15 at the time. I have learned that the book was as much about her family as about the group, but the writer chose to basically only do the musical part of the story. And, I’m sorry, but even if it is all true, it’s so predictable. ... Read more »
Ryan’s Daughter
David Lean was best known for masterful versions of the Dickens novels Great Expectations and Oliver Twist, and Brief Encounter. Small-scale, black and white pictures. Then he made five large Technicolor films, beginning with The Bridge on the River Kwai, ... Read more »